Baja Chicken Sandwiches

I have mentioned many times that somehow all the TV shows I like have been crammed into Wednesday night, right? Well, last night was the finale of Alan Alda's The Human Spark on PBS, a three-part series exploring "What is the nature of human uniqueness?" Now, I am not a science guy at all; it has never really interested me. But this is an absolutely fascinating program, perhaps the most interesting program I have seen in years (that did not involve baseball trade rumors or guys eating 6 pound hamburgers.) Of course, it had to be shown on Wednesdays, it could not have been any other way. So I knew last night was going to be a TV-and-dinner-on-the-couch night. (I linked to the PBS website, where you can watch full episodes or clips. I promise, it's worth checking out, if only for just five minutes.)

On Martin Luther King Day I had the day off, and I sent my mom a text letting her know that I was going to swing by her house and pick up a couple things. She replied that she also had the day off and was just heading up to Taylor's butcher shop - which I love - and wanted to know if there was anything she could get me. I wrote that I would love two breasts of their "Baja" chicken, one of my three favorite among the ten or so flavors of chicken breast that they marinate.

Moms being moms, she got me twice as much food as I asked for. I'm not complaining, but these are not skimpy breasts, they are very nice size pieces. (Just for the record, I will not being making any breast jokes. Way too easy.) I can barely eat one by myself. So Elizabeth and I invited our friend (and neighbor) Tracie over to have sandwiches. 

A few days ago I came across a recipe for a red onion relish. (I don't remember it completely, and it's possible what I made bears no resemblance to it.) I sliced two red onions thinly and blanched them in boiling water for a couple minutes, then let them cool in a bowl in the fridge with some of the Sauvignon vinegar I got from Beyond the Olive in Old Town. After a while, maybe two hours, I added a chopped bunch of cilantro, several dashes of hot sauce, and some salt and pepper. This may not have been the recipe, but it was delicious. 

I roasted the breasts in the oven for about 45 minutes while I cooked some broccoli with black and red pepper in my new Le Creuset pot. (I received a 7 quart, "Caribbean Blue" Le Creuset pot from Elizabeth for Christmas and I have pretty much used it for everything possible in the last three weeks. I'm about 48 hours away from cooking my cat giving my cat a bath in this beautiful thing.)

At first I removed the skin and put an entire breast of chicken on each bun. It looked ridiculous, a half-foot high sandwich that surely would not have ended well for anyone. So I halved each breast lengthwise and tried it that way. It looked more acceptable and I added some of the red onion mix to each. 

I loved these sandwiches; they were full of flavor. The tangy/sweet red onions were a nice touch, but honestly the chicken was so good that it did not need any accompaniment. We all finished our plates. The best part? I still have two and a half breasts left in the fridge. Now I just have figure out if I'm going to use them for pizza, nachos, more sandwiches, etc...

Pick Up Stix

I wrote about Pick Up Stix back in November of 2008. I have been eating there occasionally for a little over a decade, and I have usually been quite pleased with it. I certainly prefer it to Panda Express, where the food sits out in steam trays, sometimes for quite a while. A decade ago I used to visit the Studio City Pickup Stix at least a couple times a month, as well as a few other locations on a less frequent basis. 

When the Alhambra store opened I went there several times - it was much closer than Studio City - but it was too erratic. When there were only a couple customers in the store, the food was always good, but when it was crowded, which it often was at lunch time, the food wasn't cooked long enough and often was served in a pool of oil. It was sloppy cooking, trying to crank out as many meals as quickly as possible with little regard for quality.

As I got a little older and more adventurous with Asian cuisines, I realized the silliness of eating fast-casual Americanized Chinese food in Alhambra, so close to the cities of Monterey Park and San Gabriel and some of the best Asian restaurants in the entire world. (I once walked by a Pizza Hut Express in Manhattan, a depressing-looking place if I ever saw one, although it, too, was crowded, just like Pickup Stix usually is.)

But I still go to Pick Up Stix every once in while. (It does not hurt that they are always sending me coupons for buy-one-get-one-free entrees.) The other afternoon, after Elizabeth and I had gone to Target, we stopped by for lunch. There was only one table of customers, so I hoped my theory held true and our food would be cooked with some attention. We got two orders of cream cheese wontons - I like them and Elizabeth loves them - and an order of their House Special Chicken: small pieces of chicken sauteed in white wine, garlic and soy sauce. 

This dish is very tasty when done well, however it's not always done well: it is the main offender in my previous comment about dishes drowning in oil. Fortunately, it was great this time. The chicken was cooked perfectly, the sauce had a nice touch of caramelization, and the bottom of the container did not have the sometimes present half-inch of oil pooled on the bottom. Normally we take at least a couple bites of food home with us from Pick Up Stix, but we finished off the carton.

The wontons were good, as usual, although there really isn't much to them. (When I make them at home I think they're better.) On Wednesdays you can get them for 25¢ each, yet we have never done that. (It was hard enough finding time to do stuff when only The Unit, Man vs. Food and Steven Seagal: Lawman were on TV; now that Ugly Betty has moved to Wednesdays it's near impossible.)

Philly's Best: Buffalo Chicken & Cheese

Last time I went to Philly's Best, a couple months ago, I lamented the fact that I ordered a pizza steak sandwich, only to discover a few minutes later a hidden-away sign advertising a "Buffalo Chicken Cheesesteak." It was no great tragedy, but my pizza cheesesteak was disappointing, and I promised myself that on my next trip I would order the Buffalo chicken. I have written before of my Jughead-like appetite for anything claiming to be "Buffalo chicken" (except, bizarrely, the most famous item - Buffalo wings.)

So, on one of the few cold nights we have had recently, I headed to Philly's Best to sit inside and catch a few minutes of the Lakers game while eating dinner. I have mentioned before that often my routine when eating here is to try a new menu item, be disappointed because it isn't as good as the cheesesteak, and then kick myself while Elizabeth enjoys the only thing she ever orders - a plain cheesesteak. She always lets me have a bite and inevitably I wish I had just ordered a regular cheesesteak instead of whatever I am trying (pizza steak, barbecue chicken sandwich, chicken pepper sandwich, etc.) I fully expected this to happen again.

However, this sandwich was great. Other than my usual pepper steak with cheese, this is the best item I have ever had from Philly's Best. The chicken was really tender, and the sauce -  I think it was Frank's Red Hot - was very spicy. I was actually glad to have ordered this.

I have tried all of the promotions now except the meatball sandwich, which I am not going to try. Twice I have ordered it and both times they were out of meatballs. I figure that is some kind of sign. I will now return to ordering my pepper steak with cheese every time. Until they come out with a new promotion.

Fast Food Review: McDonald's Mac Snack Wrap

Do you remember the movie Jurassic Park, when Jeff Goldblum's character says something along the lines of "You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you never stopped to think if you should"? I thought about that last night. We'll come back to that in a minute.

Ads for McDonald's "Mac Snack Wrap" have been ubiquitous lately. Basically, it's the same ingredients as a Big Mac, except instead of being served on a sesame seed bun, as it has been since 1967, it's served in a "warm flour tortilla." I've never been a big fan of the Big Mac. When I was younger it was always chicken nuggets for me, including those magical days when Shanghai McNuggets still existed. Now that I'm older, well, I still love the McNuggets, but if I want a burger I just get the McDouble (formerly the Double Cheeseburger.)

I once had a Big Mac in Bologna, Italy, when I was starving, and it was great. (That's the kind of jackass I was when I was younger; I could be in Italy and eating at McDonald's was still a viable option.) But in the last decade I probably have not had Big Mac even once. 

Still, I am almost always willing to try a new fast food promotion. Usually a promotion will look great in the commercials, and then you open them to find something bearing little resemblance to the ad. The Mac Snack Wrap, however, looks terrible in every ad. I have seen the commercials with at least half a dozen friends, and all of them think it looks bad. So I picked one up - it was a $1.67 with tax - and took it home and unwrapped it, wondering if it really was going to look as bad as advertised. 

It did. It looked disgusting. There were two thin strips of rubbery beef, an unnaturally yellow cheese, and the wrap was just drowning in "secret sauce." I hesitantly took a bite. It was horrible, the worst thing I have tried in quite a while. It sort of tasted like a Big Mac, but without much meat and with way too much sauce. And the tortilla was just weird. It wasn't warm, it wasn't fresh, and it was distracting. 

I am not sure what the point of the Snack Wrap is. It's a little bit healthier than a Big Mac, but by no means is it healthy. (It's also much smaller, so you'd probably have to eat two to be satisfied, which would negate the health benefits.) It seems like McDonald's just said: "Hey, people eat other stuff in wraps, why not put a Big Mac in a wrap?" And nobody bothered to stop and ask "Wait... why?"

Wine Dinner

I first met my friend Tim about seven years ago, although we were more like casual acquaintances back then. He is a wine distributor and we would talk briefly about wine and not much else. But we became friends two and a half years ago on my birthday; we were both hanging out at the same bar and my friend Tracie gave me a bottle of Tignanello. Tim was impressed.

The last couple years, when the latest BV Latour Private Reserve Cabernet has become ready to drink, we have made a point to get together with Tracie and drink it. Instead of going to a bar or restaurant this year, I suggested we get together on my patio and have some cheese with the wine. Tim agreed and said he would also bring a 1983 Chateau d'Yquem. Tracie promised this wine would be a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." I looked up the 1983 on a couple websites. The bottles I found were going for between $700 and $1100. There is no way Tim was going to bring over a bottle of this.... was there?

I said I would get some bread and cheese and Tracie could handle the salami. (If you think I made a lewd joke to her about that, well then you know me well.) I got some Boursin and some burrata. (Tim also brought over some Stilton.) I toasted several slices of a baguette, then topped them with pieces of roasted red pepper, chopped basil, and burrata. Tracie picked up some Toscano salami, soppressata, and salumi. 

The first wine we started with was a Koehler Cabernet. This was the winery my friends Jim and Rachel got married at last year, and this was the last bottle I had left from that weekend. It was outstanding. Tim had never tried it before, and he really liked it as well.

Then we moved on to the BV Latour. I have always loved this wine. It's possible this was the first wine I ever tried. (My dad has a collection of them going back almost 50 years.) This bottle was the 2006, and it was phenomenal. I loved the 2005 we tried a year ago, but I do not remember loving it this much. By this point in the evening our friend Murph had joined us, and he summed it up best with one word: "Amazing."

After finishing the Latour, we still had plenty of cheese left and we wanted some more red wine before we moved on. Tracie and Murph were willing to run down to the liquor store, but then Tim said "I just remembered I have two cases of Numanthia Termes in my car. It's for a friend but I'm giving it to him at cost so he won't mind if it's one bottle short." It was a very good wine, but it suffered in comparison to the Latour, as most wines would. I liked it a lot and I would love to try a bottle by itself at some point, but it was not nearly as deep as the Latour.

Then we moved on to the Sauternes. The cork was damaged and it took Tim a while to get it out, but he did, quite impressively. This Chateau d'Yquem was, to put it simply, one of the most spectacular things I have ever experienced. (Murph inquired about the cost; Tim said "If you tried to buy this bottle today it would probably cost you about a thousand bucks." Oh.) The aroma of the wine, which we enjoyed for several minutes before tasting it, was as decadent as anything I have ever smelled. 

I can't really describe the taste: caramel, vanilla, tropical fruit - they were all there. We drank it slowly with some shortbread cookies and fig cake. Tracie held her glass up, pointing out what looked like sugar crystals. Murph even sat aside the ever-present Dr Pepper (that accompanies whatever alcohol he is drinking) so he could concentrate on the wine. Tim thanked us for allowing him to share his wine with us, as if somehow we were doing him a favor. 

I let that last sip linger in my glass for at least fifteen minutes. I wanted it so much and yet didn't want it at all; I didn't want it to end. Eventually I closed my eyes and finished it. I may have tasted better things in my life, but I do not remember when.